Marriage Discourse on Chinese Social Media: An LLM-assisted Analysis
It provides insights for culturally informed policies to address marriage decline in China, but is incremental as it applies an existing framework to new data.
This study analyzed sentiment and moral elements in 219,358 marriage-related posts from Chinese social media to understand declining marriage rates, finding that posts invoking autonomy and community were predominantly negative, while divinity-framed posts tended toward positive sentiment.
China's marriage registrations have declined substantially, dropping from 13.47 million couples in 2013 to 6.1 million in 2024. This study examined sentiment and moral elements underlying 219,358 marriage-related posts from Weibo and Xiaohongshu using large language model (LLM)-assisted content analysis. Drawing on Shweder's Big Three moral ethics framework, posts were coded for sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) and moral elements (autonomy, community, divinity). Results revealed platform differences: Weibo leaned toward positive sentiment, while Xiaohongshu was predominantly neutral. Most posts lacked explicit moral framing. However, when moral elements were invoked, significant associations with sentiment emerged. Posts invoking autonomy and community were predominantly negative, whereas divinity-framed posts tended toward positive sentiment. These findings suggest that concerns about both personal autonomy constraints and communal obligations contribute to negative marriage attitudes in contemporary China, offering insights for culturally informed policies addressing marriage decline.